2 . More than half a trillion dollars. That's the estimated value of all the stuff that U. S. shoppers bought last year only to return it—more than the economy of Israel or Austria. We tried new brands with unfamiliar sizes after seeing them on TikTok. We overbought for the holidays, and we shopped overly online, where returns are between two and five times more likely than that from stores.

Where does it all go? Take the blanket I bought on holiday sale for example. I opened the package, only to discover it was just too small for my new sofa. So I returned it. Sorry, blanket! What will happen to it?

“Your blanket is very likely to be in a landfill,” says Hitendra Chaturvedi, a supply chain management professor at Arizona State University. “That is what consumers don't realize—the life of a return is a very, very sad path.” Value is the big threshold (门槛): Is the product worth the cost of shipping back and paying someone to inspect, clean, repair or test? Experts estimate that retailers (零售商) throw away about 25％ of their returns. Every year, U. S. returns create almost 6 billion pounds of landfill waste.

Many others get resold in discount and outlet stores. Some go to sellers on websites. Some get donated to charity or recycled. “These options have increased over the past decade, allowing more and more returns to find a new home”, says Marcus Shen, chief operating officer of B-Stock, a platform where retailers can resell their returns, often to smaller stores.

As companies compete on flexible return policies, technology is also slowly playing a part: helping shoppers buy the right-size sweater or picture a new blanket inside their room. Most importantly, She says, shoppers themselves are getting more and more comfortable with buying stuff that's not exactly brand-new.

“The idea of that is no longer scary for us, right?” he says. On his holiday-returns agenda is an electric, self-heating coffee mug that he has never opened, and he feels confident it will find a happy new buyer.

3 . As a means of dealing with loneliness and social isolation (孤立) in English towns, local police forces have begun providing specific public benches that can be used for making friends and having conversations.

The “Chat Benches”, which are now located in two different parks and outdoor areas in Somerset, are recognized by a little sign reading: “Sit here if you don’t mind someone stopping to say hello!”

The Avon and Somerset Police Department Facebook page recently published photos of their two new “Chat Benches” in Burnham and Taunton with an encouraging note for readers to stop by and use them for socialization (社交). “The sign simply helps to break the silence between strangers who find themselves sharing a common place,” says the police department. “We can all play a part. Simply stopping to say ‘hello’ to someone at the ‘Chat Bench’ could make life a little better for many people.”

According to a survey of the department, 17% of old people are only in contact with family, friends and neighbors less than once a week. This rises to about 9 million British people who suffer from loneliness and isolation each year.

The police force started the Chat Bench earlier this month to go with World Elder Abuse (虐待) Awareness Day. Though the officers say that there are many different forms of elder abuse which need our concern (关心), they hope that the Chat Bench will help to deal with senior loneliness in their communities. “The Chat Bench is a fantastic new thing and I hope people of all ages start many more conversations in the future,” says Police and Crime Commissioner Sue Mountstevens.

4 . There's an old joke about how you can never buy beer——just rent it. Who would think that the same joke applies to book buying in the digital age? But that's the case. Many people who will be loading their iPads or Amazon Kindles with bestsellers or classics won't have any idea how limited their rights are as their books' "owners". Unlike the owners of a physical book, they won't have the unlimited right to lend an e-book, give it away, or resell it.

All these restrictions "raise obvious questions about what "ownership' is," observes Dan Gillmor, an expert on digital media. "The companies that license stuff digitally have made it clear that you own nothing." The rules are based on the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), with which Congress hoped to balance the rights of copyright holders and content users. "In the digital environment, that's always been the trickiest balance to achieve, "Annemarie Bridy, a specialist said.

Both camps have important fights to protect. In the digital world, technology allows infinite(无限的）copies to be made. One could give away an e-book and still have it to read. This becomes a great threat to the livelihood of authors, artists, filmmakers and musicians. So some limitation is sensible. That's usually done through digital rights management, or DRM, which encodes copy limitations into the digital file. The DMCA protected DR M. The question is whether the balance has given an unfair advantage to the booksellers, at the consumers expense. The answer is yes.

For one thing, DRM has put far too much power in the hands of digital booksellers. In 2009, Amazon simply deleted some e-books from buyers, Kindles secretly. An uproar(鼓噪）followed. Amazon then promised never to steal a book back from a Kindle without the device owner's permission. But in early 2012, the company shut down the access of Linn Jordet Nygaard, a Norwegian Kindle owner, to her library of 43 e-books. Another uproar followed, and Amazon backed down again, restoring Nygaard's account.

Another problem of e-book DRM is that most e-books are tied to the seller's reading device. Buy a book from Amazon, and you can read it only on a Kindle or Amazon app. This lock-in gives the booksellers power over not only consumers but publishers.

Moreover, nowhere does Amazon, Apple or any other distributor promise to support its digital formats forever. There are ways to protect your e-books by changing the format. But is it legal? No one is quite sure.

The guiding principle must be that an e-book owner's rights and responsibilities parallel those of a printed book owner, and the same must apply to authors, publishers and booksellers.Clarify these rules, and the book market will reap the benefit.

Leave the rules as vague (模糊的) as they are, and the victims will be authors, consumers and publishers.

6 . Our teenagers are lonely. A new study by Harvard’s Making Caring Common (MCC) shows just how that feeling has been common and become serious during the past year when we had to keep the social distance. One year’s online learning and life in the bedrooms rather than the classrooms or dorm rooms can make teenagers feel lonelier than before. Teenagers have been more likely to be influenced by loneliness than older adults.

Experiencing loneliness is certainly sad, but it is also perilous. Researchers found that 63％ of the young were suffering from bad sleep, anxiety, and poor health during the lockdown(活动限 制 ) and that nearly a quarter had started or increased some bad habits, including smoking, drinking and staying up late to deal with their feelings.

About half of the young people in the study, who said they had felt lonely, explained that over the past weeks not one person had taken more than just a few minutes to ask how they had been lately. It made them feel they had no one who really cared about them. Their parents thought they had much free time after lessons and it seemed that they only worried whether their children could perform their schoolwork at the level they once did. They didn’t know the problem.

Sian Leah Beilock, the president of Barnard College, explains that young people depend on social media, which makes them especially weak to social media’s harms. She also suggests that fewer close friends may explain some of the feelings of loneliness. She reports that in 1985 the average American had three close friends with whom they could share important things about their lives. In 2004, that number had dropped to just two friends. And in 2019. one in five millennials(千禧一代) had no friends at all.

These levels of loneliness are heartbreaking. MCC suggests, as a nation, we first should focus on teaching the young to make meaningful connections between people and support them.

Have you ever photographed a juicy steak when you eat in restaurants? You may either want to share what you eat with your friends     1     just post part of your daily life on the Internet. However, such action may be disturbing to other diners. In the last few years, more and more people    2     (begin) to consider "foodstagramming" as very bad-mannered.

In many restaurants, diners complain of     3     (blind) by flashes, snapped without their permission. Even    4    (chef) and restaurant owners get angry at food photography.

    5     Michelin-starred chef said: " It's hard to build a     6    (memory) evening when flashes are flying every six minutes. ”

There is no definite result in the debate on    7     it is OK to take photographs of your food in restaurants. Some restaurants in New York City have started banning customers     8    taking photos of their food. Related policies vary from restaurant to restaurant,    9     (range)from restrictions on using a flash to complete bans. However, some other restaurants are offering food photography courses to guide its customers to    10     (well) take food pictures than ever without annoying other diners.

8 . September is upon us, which means one thing for parents and children alike: term time. Many will be excited to engage in-person, after months of remote learning. Unfortunately,this won't apply to everyone. It's alarming that an estimated 540,000 children will continue to stay at home, due to mental or physical health concerns directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic (流行病）．For those that aren't able to attend classes in person, maintaining some form of connection with their peers is vitally important, both to protect their educational development and to prevent them from becoming isolated(孤独）。

No Isolation, a company that specializes in understanding and reducing the impact of loneliness, has decided to take action. Throughout the summer, No Isolation worked with independent researcher,Henry Peck, to better understand the effect of lockdown on educational and emotional development in school-aged children. They collected responses from some primary and middle school students and found that about 1,320 children, or more than 75% of the surveyed, were more or less lonely during the lockdown.

There is no immediate “fix" for loneliness, but there are steps to be taken to help.Parents need to open up a dialogue around what loneliness is, and what it feels like, so as to stress that feeling lonely is completely normal and a topic that is safe to talk about. For adults, loneliness is a shame, which means that often they are not open enough about it with each other, let alone with their children. Parents need to break the taboo around loneliness by talking and encouraging children to share their emotions.They also need to learn to ask for help. Sometimes these emotions need to be talked through with family or with a professional. Now, more than ever, parents should be listening to children and helping to make sure they are heard when they feel lonely. They are facing the same pandemic,and they deserve all of the help and support they can get.

9 . Prashant Mandal shares a small hut with his wife and four kids, lives on less than $2 a day and recently suffered medical debts of more than $4,000 after his teenage son got sick last year. Yet, despite Mandal’s modest earnings, he spends 20 percent of his income on solar energy, an expense which is key to drawing in customers and helping his children to study. Across the globe, about 1.2 billion people live without electricity. Such limitations are not only inconvenient, but they put people in low-income countries at a greater risk of developing serious health condition. People living without electricity typically rely on kerosene lamps and other harmful light sources, which can lead to burns, injuries, poisoning and other risks .

Realizing the need for a more efficient energy source, a handful of for-profit companies have developed business models that enable under-served people to purchase (购买) solar energy, and, in turn, protect themselves and the environment in the process. Simpa Networks, which focuses its efforts on rural India, is such a company that has found a way to make solar energy affordable and accessible to people in need. Customers are charged a small down payment. Then, through its “progressive purchase” model, they pay in advance for a designated (指定的) amount of energy consumption. A number of other companies have found ways to get solar energy into the hands, and homes, of people who typically can’t afford electricity. MPOWERD, a New York-based company, invented an inflatable solar light that is powered by the sun, and is also able to store that energy.

The Luci, which can provide light for up to about 12 hours, is marketed in the developed world as an efficient camping light. Those sales allow the company to keep its production costs down so that they’re actually affordable in low-income countries. “Energy poverty is discouraging but solvable if we all work together,” said John Salzinger, MPOWERD’s co-founder. “Every single consumer’s purchase helps us reduce costs, and then we pass those savings on to those who need affordable lights the most.”